(in his own words) Being a Boy with a Pleasing Manner but a Positively Startling Lack of Brain, I left school at fourteen and, after four years training in accountancy and surveying, served over six years in the army, passing the time as a Drill and Weapons Training Instructor, Personal Assistant to the Director of Military Operations at the War Office in London and Personal Assistant to the General Officer Commanding the Royal West African Frontier Force in Nigeria; followed by a further period in the Territorial branch of the Special Air Service; I then spent five years in industry and commerce as Personal Assistant to the Chief Executive Officers of Canadian Pacific and Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds, the giant iron and steel company.

Scots by birth, Alan Milne spent his childhood in London, where his father was a preparatory schoolmaster. His early education owed much to the skills of a young teacher and mentor -- H.G. Wells -- years later, Milne described Wells as "a great writer and a great friend." He continued his education at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He bequethed his original handwritten manuscripts of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner to the College Library. While an undergraduate at Cambridge he edited Granta for a year -- his first literary efforts were published in the humourous magazine Punch, where a month after his twenty-fourth birthday he started work as Assistant Editor, remaining there until the outbreak of the First World War.

Once upon a time, a long time ago now, about last 1925, Christopher Milne left Mallord Street in Chelsea with his mother and father to live at Cotchford Farm in Sussex. This remained his home for many years, until he began to walk the paths that eventually led to an idyllic eighteenth-century hillside home, a former forge in Embridge, Devon, where, surrounded by plane trees, oaks, hazels, pansies, daffodils, primroses, bluebells, campions, narcissi and sun-basking cats, he shared many happy years with his wife, Lesley, and their daughter, Clare. Sadly, continuing ill health forced him away from that peaceful hollow in the hill and he spent his last few years with his Lesley and Clare in an early nineteenth-century house situated on the outskirts of Totnes in Devon, complete with walled garden, lily pond and conservatory.

Ernest Shepard, who died in the fiftieth anniversary year of Winnie-the-Pooh, lived in Lodsworth in Sussex and spent his childhood years in London. He was born only a five-minute walk from the birthplace of A.A. Milne, but it would be many years before their first meeting when their names would be linked for all time to one of the most loved of all bears.

After training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, my professional career began in the summer of 1966 at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre in the world premiere of 'Jack of Spades,' written by Norman Beaton and directed by Terry Hands.

Just before Christmas that year, I joined the company of actors at the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre, not realising that I would soon meet three bears – one in Liverpool, and two in London. One of them would forever change my life.